Simple Firmware Interface (SFI) is developed by

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...

as a lightweight method for firmware to export static tables to the operating system. It is supported by Intel's hand-held Moorestown platform. SFI tables are

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

s in memory, and all SFI tables share a common table header format. The

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

finds the system table by searching 16 byte boundaries between physical address and . SFI has CPU, APIC, Memory Map, Idle, Frequency, M-Timer, M-RTC, OEMx, Wake Vector, I²C Device, and a SPI Device table. SFI provides access to a standard

ACPI Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto con ...

XSDT (Extended System Description Table). XSDT is used by SFI to prevent namespace collision between SPI and ACPI. It can access standard ACPI tables such as PCI Memory Configuration Table (MCFG). SFI support was merged into

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

2.6.32-rc1; the core SFI patch is about 1,000 lines of code. Linux is the first operating system with an SFI implementation. Linux kernel 5.6 marked SFI as obsolete. SFI support was removed in Linux kernel 5.12.

References

External links

* * {{Intel Firmware Intel